guilty pleasures

is not Abba Gold.
no, a true guilty pleasure is going to the movies smack in the middle of a work day.
and it's not the same thing in Alabama (you don't really refer to days as "work days" when you're a graduate student or even an instructor on faculty).
definitely a New York thing, and almost as if Woody Allen movies served as the professor.
but I guess I fell a bit short on the cinematic hooky scale (a C+?): I didn't go to Manhattan (let alone the Paris Theatre or the Film Forum or the Angelika) and I didn't see a foreign film (say, The Sorrow and the Pity), but by 1 o'clock on a Friday afternoon I had already viewed footage of the back of Natalie Portman's head, shot by a hand-held camera, as it moved across the plaza at Lincoln Center.

Tower Heist is coming back to the neighborhood next week, by the way.

see, I don't go to movies.
I watch them on television, have access to Showtime and HBO and remain a long-time Netflix customer, but I don't go to movies.
which makes it all the more surprising to say: I've seen six of this year's ten Best Picture nominees.

by last New Year's Eve I'd seen one.
by January 31st I'd seen two.
and now, less than two weeks into February . . .
go figure.

kind of makes me sound a bit slothful, but I've actually conducted eleven full-length interviews in the first eleven days of the month so I'm going to suggest that it's just barely possible that I've done a better job than usual of managing my time.

in any case, if I had a vote (and I don't) I think there's a good chance I'd cast my ballot for Toy Story 3 (and I have no idea why The Kids Are All Right was nominated for anything as it adopted the tone of a pseudo-serious rom-com and spread more stereotypes than truths about both adoption and non-traditional families (just don't get that one at all)).

news on the Tusk book:
I received an e-mail from someone "in the know" that the book has been selling "quite steadily," and just today an excerpt was published (shared/posted) on the 33 1/3 blog, so thanks to all of you bloggers and tweeters and conventional word-of-mouthers for kind of pushing it along.

I definitely feel like a pig on his way to a barbecue right about now.